Education in Real Time: The Globalization of Synchronized Learning

In a globalizing world of intense intercultural and transnational interactions, learning and knowledge are becoming increasingly more standardized and homogeneous based on the assumption that the world is functioning in real time. This drive for standardization (expressed in practices such as harmonization of higher education, national curriculum standards and international testing) is facilitated in part by technological innovation and it takes place in a world of shrinking time—space where time is seen as uniform, linear and de-contextualized. The author argues that the concept of time is central in the construction of knowledge, the experience of difference and the labour of pedagogy. The dominant assumption of living in a synchronized, globalized world where everyone is connected in real time has implications for the ways in which educational practices generate new ‘scientific’ ways of constructing otherness and justifying inequality, albeit under the banners of quality, accountability and choice.